“He does not displease her. What more do we want? She is a good little girl, and knows that she can entrust her happiness to my hands. And Lucien is a capital fellow. They will be very happy.”
Thus he warned a sensitive Martin off philandering paths, and, with his French adroitness, separated youth and maiden as much as possible. And this was not difficult. You see Félise acted as manageress in the Hôtel des Grottes, and her activities were innumerable. There was the kitchen to be ruled, an eye to be kept on the handle of the basket—if it danced too much, according to the French phrase, the cook was exceeding her commission of a sou in the franc; there were the bedrooms and clean dry linen to be seen to, and the doings of Polydore, the unclean, and of Baptiste, the haphazard, to be watched; there were daily bills to be made out, accounts to be balanced, impatient bagmen to be cajoled or rebuked; orders for pâté de foie gras and truffles to be despatched—the Hôtel des Grottes had a famous manufactory of these delights and during autumn and winter supported a hive of workers and the shelves in the cool store-house were filled with appetising jars; and then the laundry and the mending and the polishing of the famous bathroom—ma foi, there was enough to keep one small manageress busy. Like a bon hôtelier, Bigourdin himself supervised all these important matters, ordering and controlling, as an administrator, but Félise was the executive. And like an obedient and happy little executive Félise did not notice a subtle increase in her duties. Nor did Martin, honest soul, in whose eyes a betrothed maiden was as sacred as a married woman, remark any change in facilities of intercourse. For him she flashed, a gracious figure, across the half real tapestry of his present life. A kindly word, a smiling glance, on passing, sufficed for the maintenance of his pleasant understanding with Félise. For feminine companionship of a stimulating kind, there was always Corinna. For masculine society he had Bigourdin and his cronies of the Café de l’Univers, to whom he was introduced in his professorial dignity.
It was there, at the café table, in the midst of the notables of the little town, that he learned many things either undreamed of or uncared for during his narrow life at Margett’s Universal College. It startled him to find himself in the company of men passionately patriotic. Hitherto, as an Englishman living remote from Continental thought, he had taken patriotism for granted; his interest in politics had been mild and parochial; he had adopted a vague conservative outlook due, most likely, to antipathy to his democratic Swiss relatives, who sent eight pounds to the relief of his impoverished mother, and to a nervous shrinking from democracy in general as represented by his pupils. But in this backwater of the world he encountered a political spirit intensely alive. Vital principles formed the subject of easy, yet stern discussion. Beneath the calm of peaceful commerce and agriculture he felt the pulse of France throbbing in fierce determination to maintain her national existence. Every man had been a soldier; some of the elders had fought in 1870, and those who had grown up sons were the fathers of soldiers. Martin realised that whereas in England, in time of peace, the private soldier was tolerated as a picturesque, good-natured, harum-scarum sort of fellow, the picu-piou in France was an object of universal affection. The army was woven into the whole web of French life; it permeated the whole of French thought; it coloured the whole of French sentiment. It was not a machine of blood and iron, as in Germany, but the soul sacrifice of a nation. “Vive la France!” meant “Vive l’armée!” And that mere expression “Vive la France!”—how often had he heard it during his short sojourn in the country. He cudgelled his brains to remember when he had heard a corresponding cry in England. It seemed to him that there was none. There was no need for one. England would live as long as the sea girded her shores and Britannia ruled the waves. We need not trouble our English heads any further. But in France conditions are different. From the Vosges to the Bay of Biscay, from Calais to the Mediterranean, every stroke on a Krupp anvil reverberated through France.
“Ça vient—when no one knows,” said the comfortable citizens, “but it is coming sooner or later, and then we shed the last drop of our blood. We are prepared. We have learned our lesson. There will never be another Sedan.”
They said it soberly, like men whose eyes were set on an implacable foe. And Martin knew that through the length and breadth of the land comfortable citizens held the same sober and stern discourse. Every inch of French soil was dear to these men, and to guard it they would shed the last drop of their blood.
Corinna informed of these conversations said lightly:
“You haven’t lived among them as long as I have. It’s just their Gallic way of talking.”
But Martin knew better. His horizons were expanding. He began, too, to conceive a curious love for a country so earnest, whose speech was the first that he had spoken. He had a vague impression that he was learning to live a corporate, instead of an individual life. When he tried to interpret these feelings to Corinna she cried out upon him:
“To hear you talk one would think you hadn’t any English blood. Isn’t England good enough for you?”
“It’s because I’m beginning to understand France that I’m beginning to understand England,” he replied in his grave way.